Email Marketing, Business & Monkeys
There are two basic autoresponder triggering methods (subscription to list and date-based-triggers) in MailChimp, but there are so many different ways you can use them.
I’ll show you 4 easy examples anybody can build in the MailChimp interface, plus one clever way to use the API to trigger your autoresponder.
MailChimp has a free add-on called Analytics360 that allows you to track how much revenue your email marketing generated on your site. We also offer a similar plugin called Ecommerce360 for carts like Magento, osCommerce, and Zencart. These plugins are really powerful because they don’t just automatically tag all your links so you can track stuff in Google Analytics. We actually pull data back out of Analytics and place it in your email marketing campaign reports.
All these stats are now available via the MailChimp API, so you can feed them into your company’s internal sales dashboard, and get that raise you deserve.
Big MailChimp API upgrade (this one’s for the geeks out there). Under your MailChimp List -> List Tools, there’s a new screen to configure “web hooks” that’ll help you keep your database synched with your MailChimp lists:
Since I have absolutely no idea what this means (I draw monkeys and I write stuff), I’m just going to point you to the MailChimp API documentation now. The only part that I understand is that this makes it much, much easier to keep your list synchronized with MailChimp:
Syncing Database Changes from MailChimp to You – Time/Delta based sync
We’re excited to announce that MailChimp now integrates with Freshbooks, to make staying in touch with all your customers painless. Basically, we’ve made it super easy to import your customers from your Freshbooks account into MailChimp. Then, you can send them email newsletters, event invitations, and autoresponders.
We’ll clean unsubscribes and bounces on MailChimp, and we’ll give you awesome reports to track your performance.
Freshbooks takes care of your billing, and MailChimp takes care of email marketing. Throw in a little Batchbook CRM, and you’ve got some kind of crazy-powerful “small business web” or something.
Here’s how it works…
At Farecompare.com, you can setup fare alerts, like “tell me if airfare for ATL to NYC drops by 20%.” Farecompare will check 3 times a day, and then instantly alert you if they detect the changes you’re looking for. They’re the first to offer such a service, and it’s extremely cool.
They use MailChimp’s API and our powerful dynamic merge tags to send these highly customized “transactional” emails.
Here’s what one of their email alerts looks like:
Now let’s take a look at how they use MailChimp’s dynamic merge tags to get this done…
One of our API users (Wim De Coninck) has written a tool to help .Net/Windows users sync up their lists with MailChimp. It basically lets you enter some very simple MailChimp info (apikey, list name, fields to sync) in a config file, write a little “glue” code, then just run the sync program.
Download the .Net MailChimp sync module here.
but wait, there’s more!
Christian Cox has created a nice tutorial (and some sample code) for building a Flash email signup form that passes subscribers to your MailChimp list. He used the MailChimp API to create some ActionScript for you.
We’d seen some examples of Flash integration w/MailChimp before, but they usually required a little PHP know-how and lacked documentation.
So a HUGE thank you goes out to Christian for all this. If you’re building websites or web apps in Flash, and want seamless email marketing integration, be sure to check this out.
Using the MailChimp API, you can connect and sync just about any application with your MailChimp account. And we’re not just talking about passing emails back and forth. We’re talking about every tiny little stat you could ever want. Your affiliate links. Your segments. Batch subs & unsubs. Updating member info. Interest groups. Segments. IP address and signup datestamps.
Batchbook (a cool online CRM) recently linked all of their users’ accounts with MailChimp.
We’ve seen MailChimp users create entire extranets for their clients using the API.
It’s extremely powerful, because we have an API team that’s dedicated to nothing BUT developing new features and integrations with the API. And it’s totally free. Check out the API documentation, and here’s a sea of logos from applications we’ve linked to, or created plugins for, with the API:
Note: that image is a slide from a recent presentation. The “Salesforce” and “Highrise” integrations are going live in January-ish with our v4 launch. If you’ve created an interesting integration with MailChimp’s API, or if you’ve used one of our plugins, please comment below. We want to showcase your work!
BatchBook has posted a handy screencast showing how to link their CRM with MailChimp to send a newsletter to your client list:
Seems like a handy way to setup a campaign to send to a targeted list of your clients. Just in time for the holiday season, too. Here’s a tip for Batchbook users: build a free holiday email template here, then add it to your MailChimp account. Now you’ve got professionally designed Thanksgiving and Christmas emails that you can send to your clients!
A little monkey love for our API users. Very soon (this weekend if not sooner), under your MailChimp –> Account settings, you’ll be getting a new screen:
It’ll allow you programmers to troubleshoot your API implementations, find out if you’re hitting our limits, and let you see overall usage by day. There’s even a handy graph to indicate any usage spikes.
Free HTML Templates →Templates tested in all major email clients, ready for customizing.
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